


What Tom Taught Ginny

by melimarron



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, BAMF Ginny Weasley, Basically how Ginny's first year was FUCKED UP, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Ginny Weasley-centric, Like how does Ginny not have some kind of PTSD from her first year???, Minor Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, also there's angst, also this is my tenth story! yay!, also trauma, but let's be real that's all I write anyway, most unrealistic part of the books about magic i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23973448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melimarron/pseuds/melimarron
Summary: Ginny Weasley fought a demon in her head during her first year at Hogwarts and lost.Eventually, Harry killed that part of Voldemort's soul, but things like that always leave scars.
Relationships: Ginny Weasley & Molly Weasley, Ginny Weasley & Ron Weasley, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood & Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom & Ginny Weasley, Tom Riddle & Ginny Weasley
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	What Tom Taught Ginny

Dumbledore is the person Voldemort feared most, and he knows him as both Tom and Voldemort, but nowadays, he can only see the serial killer made from the child he once knew.

Harry is Voldemort’s equal, and he knows him as Voldemort, because how can he look at that vile man who murdered his parents and see anything but a monster?

But Ginny knew _Tom_ , even if that was only a mask the diary wore to earn her trust. She doesn’t mistake Tom for her friend, of course, not after her first year, but she knows _Tom_ , all the same.

Sometimes, she wakes up, so desperately lonely, fingers itching for a friend to write to.

Sometimes, she looks down at her hands and thinks she can still see the red paint dripping off them, terrified and wondering if she was going mad.

Sometimes, she thinks everyone else forgets that Dumbledore is not the only person who calls Lord Voldemort, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, _Tom Marvolo Riddle_ , by his birth name.

She can usually shake off these thoughts as quickly as they sprout, reaching for her wand and reminding herself in as fierce a voice as she can muster that he does not have the grip that he once had over her. She will never wake up in a confused haze again, clothing ruined and blank spots in her memory. She will never watch her body move against her will ever again. She will never have to listen to the sickly sweet words of a too pale, too handsome, too clever boy ever again.

But sometimes, she can’t shake away those cobwebs of memory quickly enough. She remembers that he had taken an eleven year old, defenseless, vulnerable, foolish. She shoots off a spell and realizes a split second too late that the words that passed her lips were spoken with Tom’s cruel twist. She catches herself hissing in class, subconsciously comforted by the noise until she realizes what she’s been doing and is so revolted that she can’t concentrate for the rest of the day. She hates the sight of red paint and vows to herself that she will raise all the roosters she can once she’s an adult and refuses to write in a diary ever again.

Her body was used against her when she was eleven. On the worst days, when Mum clucks over her and one or two or all of her brothers laugh and mock her, she crawls under the covers of her bed and stares at shaking hands that had once been covered with red paint and remembers the utter terror of her first year. She remembers hissing and jumping down to the Chamber of Secrets with Tom whispering that she is going to die and fighting with all her eleven year old might against him.

When she’s older, when she starts to reopen herself to people, she’s wary at first. Luna’s friendship had come easily. After the fiasco of first year, and the taunts she had endured from her brothers who didn’t understand exactly what the diary had done to her, Ginny was especially sensitive to taunts about people’s sanity.

After Luna, it became easier to talk to people, to forget the horrors of first year. She gets closer to her roommates, proves that she is not the aloof pureblood they’d thought she was. She puts on a show of normalcy, because at some point, it would be true, right?

She wakes up screaming night after night. She learns the Silencing Charm from Percy, insisting that she wanted to use it to get some peace and quiet for studying, and continues to wake up screaming.

In some ways, she prefers to wake up screaming than to wake up calmly. If she’s screaming, she’s in charge of her voice. If she’s screaming, she’s in charge of her body.

She thinks she might be getting back to normal, and then Sirius Black attacks her brother.

While Harry and Ron and Hermione are confronting the man who killed James and Lily Potter, Ginny is flying, flying, flying, as fast as she can, to escape the nightmares and the memories.

When dementors attack, Ginny feels red paint on her hands and the arm of a ghost wrapped around her shoulders, whispering to her in his smooth, ugly voice.

When dementors attack, Ginny feels cold and hopeless and the worst part of it is that she recognizes this feeling, remembers what it was like to feel hopeless when four members of her family had failed to realize how she had changed and failed to help her when she’d tried to ask for it.

When dementors attack, Ginny does not have the safety of the Patronus Charm on her side. What she has is chocolate and Luna and the feeling of a pen in her hands as she unwittingly betrays everything that her family stands for.

She is more relieved than she can ever say when they finally leave.

Third year is when she thinks she might be back to normal. She goes to Hogsmeade with Beauxbatons and Drumstrang and Hogwarts students and they all laugh over Butterbeer and mock each other playfully. She makes more friends than she ever thought she could have and races her friends on their brooms and cheers Harry on in the First Task.

Then Professor Moody announces they’ll be fighting off the Imperious Curse, and Ginny can feel herself going dead white. Luna, the only person she had ever confided in about Tom, squeezes her shoulder comfortingly and offers to send Nargles into Moody’s brain so he’d forget about Ginny when it was her turn to go.

Ginny declines Luna’s offer. When her classmates are Imperioused and made to do ridiculous things against their will, she is one of the only people who doesn't laugh. She knows how it feels to have your free will stolen. She knows what it’s like to watch your body move by another’s will to release snakes or paint on the wall or laugh with a laugh that is not your own and only being able to scream for help inside your head.

When Moody points at her and crooks a finger, she stands up and walks down the aisle, as though she is in a daze, as if the curse had already been put on her.

“Imperio,” he says, and Ginny can feel herself locking up. She wants nothing more than to vomit, or to run, or to take out her wand and _Crucio_ Moody into oblivion. She _refuses_ to have her free will taken from her. Not again. Never again.

She manages to stop herself from following his invisible orders, crushes down on the oblivious happiness, because the washed-up Death Eater administering it is nothing compared to Tom. _Sing your least favorite song_ , Moody commands through the Imperious curse, because he doesn’t know that she is not the average thirteen-year-old who doesn’t want to humiliate herself in front of her classmates, but instead an average thirteen-year-old who has experienced being controlled before and _will not allow that to ever happen again_.

After watching herself do worse and worse actions without her own mind guiding them, Ginny Weasley will not allow herself to be controlled again for something as silly as singing a god-awful Celestina Warbeck song.

She does not surrender to the Imperious Curse. That would be too much like surrendering to Tom. She refuses to do either, now that she knows better.

Then the Second Task happens and Ginny realizes that _Ron_ is down there. Her brother was down there, drowning helplessly in the lake, and for a moment, all she can remember is how once in her first year, Moaning Myrtle had talked to her/Tom about how the plumbing was a direct line to the lakes and the viciousness of the mermaids and how they showed no mercy to anyone who went too deep.

Ron survives, thankfully, and Harry later mentions that he figured out the egg clue with a tip from Cedric and _Moaning Myrtle_ , of all people, and Ginny marches down to the bathroom she hadn’t been in since Fawkes and Harry had dragged her out of it two years before to thank the ghost quickly before leaving the bathroom as soon as possible. Even years later, the sight of the sinks makes her nauseous.

Then the Third Task happens.

Then Tom is back.

Ginny spends the summer in a state of anxiety. _What if he remembers me, what if he comes for me, what if he tries to control me again?_ They go to Grimmauld Place and for a while, Ginny could almost believe that she is safe there, if not for her own mind insisting that _yes he remembers you, yes he will come for you, yes he will control you again and this time you will never escape him._

She practices spells and watches Sirius moping around the place and listens to Ron and Herminone get into loud arguments with Mum and Dumbledore about telling Harry the truth about where they were.

The school year begins and Ginny gets detention almost immediately after Harry does for having his back and agreeing that Tom was back. She is sure to say _Voldemort_ , partially for the flinch that crosses Umbridge’s toady face and partially to beat back the prickles in her mind that insist that he will always have a grip on her.

The detention is the second time she has written in red since she got to Hogwarts, but in the privacy of her mind, she thinks that the first time was worse.

After that detention, she is sure to keep her mouth shut around Umbridge, especially as Harry and Fred and George seemed intent on antagonizing her. She keeps her head down and rolls her eyes at Luna, whose dreamy demeanor has been cracked by Umbridge- Luna is even insulting the toad behind her back, something Ginny would have thought impossible for her.

Hermione comes to Ginny a few months into the school year and proposes a plan for learning _real_ Defense, not whatever the hell the toad thought she was doing. Ginny goes along with it gladly, rounding up all the friends she can convince, and ends up in the Room of Requirement, ready to learn from Harry’s expertise.

For a while, things are good. She’s learning again, she’s getting to know Harry a little better, she’s finally learned how to create a Patronous.

Then McGonagall shakes her awake one night before winter break and orders her to get dressed and go to the Headmaster’s office as soon as possible.

Seeing Dad in the hospital is _awful_. Harry mentions that, somehow, _he_ was the snake that did it, and looks so hollow-eyed that Ginny doesn’t quite have the heart to tell him that’s impossible until he starts making noises about having possibly been controlled by Tom. _Then_ she’s all too glad to icily point out that she had actually been controlled by Voldemort, so there was no point in worrying without asking her what it was like first.

They return to school, and everything is actually starting to be okay. Of course, that’s when Dobby comes running into the Room of Requirement, trembling and babbling warnings. The DA is disbanded for safety reasons and Umbridge becomes Headmistress and Fred and George wreak havoc before leaving Hogwarts forever and Professor McGonagall is hospitalized.

Then Harry has a vision.

Ginny and Luna and Neville and Ron and Hermione and Harry fly to London on the backs of invisible thestrals. They find Voldemort’s followers waiting for them. They find _Voldemort_ waiting for them.

Sirius dies.

Sirius dies, and in the aftermath, held back from interfering, Ginny stares Tom in the eyes as he fights Dumbledore and does her best not to see the sixteen-year-old boy she once knew in those monstrous features, even as her subconscious picks out little things like the curve of his cheek or his long fingers or the way he holds his wand.

Everyone returns home, as they always do after a school year ends. Ron and Ginny go home with scars that Ron deems “wicked”. Mum takes one good look at them once they all get back to the Burrow and starts fussing over them while simultaneously shouting at them about how _dangerous_ their actions had been, don’t they know not to do that without an adult by now, they are both underage and should have at least gone with an adult or verified that Harry’s vision was true.

Ginny and Ron roll their eyes at each other behind Mum’s back, and then Ron points out that they had _reason_ to think Harry’s vision was true, as the _last_ time he’d had a vision, it had saved Dad’s life. That comment buys them enough time to quickly excuse themselves and run upstairs as quickly as they could to unpack.

Over the summer, Ginny perfects the Bat Bogey Hex in her room, despite being unable to actually perform magic with her own wand. She sneaks downstairs when everyone’s asleep and steals her mother’s wand, the way she had once stolen her brothers’ brooms when she was younger, and practices whenever the nightmares keep her awake.

These days, her nightmares are about dead fathers and noseless men and adults who can finally hear her cries for help but refuse to do anything to actually help her. Every so often, she gets one of her old nightmares about no longer being able to control her body, forced to watch the sixteen-year-old version of the Wizarding World’s worst enemy sneak around undetected in her body and do whatever he wants with it.

The nighttime practice pays off, at least, successfully holding off the nightmares and, when she gets back on the train to return to Hogwarts, helps her to get Zacharias Smith off her back and earns her an invitation to the “prestigious” Slug Club.

She has a moment of panic in the first week of classes when Hermione mentions Harry has been taking orders from a book, sending her spiraling back to the lonely days just before first year began, when she had written _My name is Ginny Weasley_ in the world’s evilest notebook.

Then Ron is poisoned on his  _ birthday _ , and even though Harry gets a bezoar down his throat in time, Ginny catches herself staring down at her brother’s too-pale face, wondering if he would die and leave them all behind.

After that, the year passes quickly, somehow. There are no attacks from snakes, either the basilisk or Nagini, or from other animals, since Ginny is certain that she isn’t the only one keeping an eye out for a rat where no rats should be.

Harry does- _something_ \- to Malfoy in a bathroom, something bad, because Ginny heard from Ron, who’d heard from Neville, who’d heard from Dean, who wasn’t speaking to Ron or Ginny since she’d broken up with him, that Snape had been seen levitating the sixteen-year-old to the Hospital Wing. Harry is taken off the Quidditch team and Katie Bell is hastily made into a temporary Captain in his absence and after a quick trial run, Ginny is made the temporary Seeker. Before their final match, Katie stands on a bench to get their attention and gives them a rousing speech about how she expects them to win, even though each and every single one of them know that there is no way they could win with Ron as Keeper and no Harry and a Seeker who’d never played as Seeker before.

Then they _win_. They somehow win the Quidditch Cup with _Ron_ as their Keeper and with Ginny as Hogwarts’ most inexperienced Seeker and with Harry stuck filing with Snape, and they’ve won, they’ve won, they’ve _won_ , and then Harry walks in.

For Ginny, that moment was immortalized in her mind.

Harry walked in, and everyone was screaming and yelling and cheering themselves hoarse and thumping the exhausted Gryffindor team on their backs, and then he and Ginny made eye contact. She isn’t sure who surged forwards first, but she didn’t care, because all of a sudden they were kissing, and the Common Room’s cheers were replaced with whoops and catcalls.

Then the peace and happiness she’d found was shattered in one night when she woke up from a nightmare and realized that her DA coin was burning.

She survives the night unscathed, thankfully, but the same cannot be said for Bill, her oldest brother, scarred forever by Fenrir Greyback, or for Dumbledore, who went tumbling down the Astronomy Tower to his death, or even for Harry, who looks hollow and scared and uncertain of his place in the world.

After the funeral of the only man Tom was ever afraid of, Harry breaks up with Ginny, for her own safety, according to him. She’s already been targeted by Tom, she thinks, watching him walk away, and she survived it before.

It doesn’t matter what Harry thinks. Breaking up with her is not going to take Tom’s eyes off of her, even if it does make Voldemort dismiss her. Breaking up with her is not going to stop her from doing what needs to be done. Breaking up with her is not going to keep her from fighting the evil things that haunt her dreams and her life, the evil things that her mother and father had raised her to despise.

Bill and Fleur’s wedding is nice, even if it is attacked and Ron and Hermione and Harry have vanished by the time the attack is over. Ginny returns to school afterwards with fear thrumming through her veins and a pact with Neville and Luna to keep fighting, no matter what.

So they do.

They fight the Carrows, and they protect the firsties, and they corral as many people as they can into the Room of Requirement. They mock the Carrows’ punishments and blatantly lie to their faces and try not to scream too loudly when the punishments get too painful to stay silent.

Luna is gone when they get back from winter break.

Luna is gone and so is Ron and Harry and Mum and Dad and Bill are in hiding and Fred and George and Charlie are fighting in the war and Percy is busy betraying the family almost as badly as she had when she was eleven.

Ginny is alone in a way that she hasn’t been since she was eleven years old and trapped in her own head, screaming for help as well-meaning family members patted her on the head and assured her that Hogwarts would just _take some getting used to_ and that she’d be fine in a few weeks.

Except she isn’t, because she has Neville and the DA and she has the fight against the Carrows. This time, the fight she is fighting is easily seen and she has allies and friends and this time, this time, this time she can hide her fear and turn it into the courage that the Sorting Hat had once told her that she would need.

She thinks she might have forgotten her courage until just now. Anyone could stand up for their friends or play Quidditch or fight alongside allies. Those weren’t the things that she was truly afraid of. Now, when things matter, she can face the walking nightmares of the Carrows and the monstrous thing that they have made Hogwarts into.

She can throw herself in front of a Crucio spell meant for a first-year and she can shepard little eleven year olds into the Room of Requirement and she can be the protector for them that she had needed but never got until it was almost too late.

She can march into Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and stare down the sinks and ask Myrtle to ask the other ghosts to help the students in their hour of need.

She can talk back to the Carrows and laugh when they send her into the Forbidden Forest and curse them back when they curse the children she is protecting.

She can be a symbol of the resistance of Hogwarts, especially once Neville is sent into hiding, and she can direct lost children to safety, and she can laugh at the Carrows’ attempts to punish her because they do not and will never understand that there is nothing in the world that will make her or Neville or Cho or Dean or anyone else who had more than two brain cells stop fighting Voldemort and his allies.

Then, after months, Luna returns, and Ginny is so relieved when she gets the news that her best friend is alive that she almost _does_ start laughing hysterically in the middle of the silent Great Hall where they eat. She gets an inordinate amount of detentions for smiling so broadly, especially when the Carrows demand to know why she was smiling and she refuses to tell them, but every single one of the detentions are worth it when Ginny walks into the Room of Requirement later that week and gets to give Luna a hug for the first time in months.

When Harry, Ron, and Hermione walk through the portrait hole, Ginny almost collapses with relief, even as she knows that their appearance at Hogwarts means that Tom is approaching the castle as well.

Once the battle begins, the fact that Mum doesn’t want her to fight is irrelevant. She could hurl any number of arguments against her decision.

 _Harry, Ron, and Hermione faced him when they were younger than I was._ I _faced him in my fourth year. This is everyone’s fight. I’ve fought on the behalf of this school and the students here for a year and I am not going to stop now. I fought him when I was eleven for an entire school year and nobody noticed- where was your protection then?_

She argues for the show of it, fire in her eyes and fury in her voice as she demands the right to finally, truly, fight the man who haunted her dreams for years.

Nobody in the room relents.

She could bring up the Chamber, but- no. If they’d forgotten, then that was good. They didn’t look at her differently, the way they had after first year. They just thought she was too young.

_Why didn’t you think I was too young when I was eleven?_

She knows, logically, that Mum and Dad and Dumbledore and everyone who was a responsible adult when she was eleven are entirely blameless when it comes to the Diary. But logic doesn’t stop the thought from wriggling its way in as she sneaks out of the Room of Requirement as soon as her family is gone.

She stares at Tom from across the battlefield. Try as she might, her gaze is glued to him, the man who had ruined her life. She doesn’t think he notices. Nobody else does, at any rate.

She looks at him, at this grotesque facade of a man, and smiles.

 _We’re going to beat you,_ she thinks.

Because here’s the thing.

Ginny Weasley was not able to defeat Tom Riddle alone. She’d tried that before.

But here, on an open battlefield, preparing to fight him and his allies on the very same grounds that he had violated her trust and free will, she knew that this time, she and the rest of the defenders of Hogwarts would win.

Ginny Weasley had been preparing to fight Tom Riddle for six years, ever since her first year, when she had realized that Hogwarts was not the safe haven her brothers had promised her it was.

Hogwarts had not been safe for Ginny Weasley when she was a child, though over time she had come to believe that it was. It had been transformed from safe to dangerous whenever Tom Riddle returned to haunt its halls.

For the children too young to fight, for the first-years trembling and scared and unable to scream for help, for the traumatized students too inexperienced to fight, Ginny Weasley takes to the battlefield with her wand and her mind and the silent ghost of Tom Riddle, still whispering in her ears after so long.

She hits a Death Eater with a Bat-Bogey Hex, invented long after Tom Riddle had left school, it being one of the spells that she knows so well that she can easily do it nonverbally, and then follows it up with a nasty trick that Tom knew to make the bogeys attack the Death Eater’s allies along with the Death Eater himself.

She shoves her wand up a troll’s nose the way Ron had once told her Harry had done and then sets off a firework spell that Fred had taught her and she does it with Tom Riddle’s hysterical laughter in her ears and bubbling out of her mouth.

She screams in defiance at a Dementor and fights off the cold and the memories that always come and summons a memory of Harry laughing in the moonlight at a dumb joke she had made and sends a horse Patronous galloping after them.

She holds her wand in one hand and punches a Death Eater with her other, the way Charlie had taught her, that Tom Riddle would have despised for being so unbearably _Muggle_ , then follows it up with a kick to the groin and a spell that she knew that no untainted witch or wizard on Harry’s side would use.

Ginny Weasley learned at their enemy’s knee, and knows the way he thinks. Knows his weaknesses and his strengths. She is not as knowledgeable as Harry, of course, who has been destined to fight Voldemort since his parents died, but she knows enough.

Then Fred dies, and Ginny can feel her world shattering.

Then Colin dies, and Ginny knows that she has failed to keep the students she had sworn to protect _safe_.

Then Harry dies, and Ginny could swear that her heart stops alongside his.

And then Tom dies.

And the nightmare is finally over.

When the fight is complete, and bodies have been lowered into graves, Ginny Weasley and Harry Potter stare down at Voldemort’s body together.

There is silence for a long time.

Then Harry reaches out to take her hand. Ginny lets him, and squeezes his hand in her own.

“Wanna help me burn him?” he offers.

Ginny can feel a twisted smile stretching across her face. “Only if we use the most Muggle way we can think of.”

They grin wildly at each other, overjoyed to have survived, to be alive and breathing and here, even as Ginny’s heart aches with loss, and then run off to the castle like children, still holding hands, to find matches.

When they finally find them, they run back down to where Tom lays, and they set fire to the body. They laugh together, and Ginny swears that she can still hear an undercurrent of Tom in her own laughter.

More people come out at that point, and they start cheering all over again.

In the center of it, Harry and Ginny and the ghost of Tom Riddle stand there, laughing together and watching Tom’s body burn until it’s nothing but ashes and bone. They are the children whose lives had been irrevocably ruined by Tom Riddle, and they laugh as he burns, the boy who had once housed Tom in his very soul and the girl who laughs and casts spells with Tom Riddle’s voice.

They laugh, and they cry, and at their feet, he burns.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think?


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